


GUTS: Digging Upwards

by apiphile



Series: thursdayverse [9]
Category: The Used
Genre: Backstory, Depression, Drug Use, M/M, Masturbation, Mob AU, Multi, Public Sex, affection through shouting, dick issues, sex as a reward, written to bribe jess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-11
Updated: 2010-05-11
Packaged: 2017-10-09 09:56:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/85939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Appendix (or Guts!) to Thursdayverse (http://archiveofourown.org/series/3368) so you'll be wanting to read that first. Also strictly speaking you should read Burning Down The House prior to this.</p><p>Dan's backstory,</p>
            </blockquote>





	GUTS: Digging Upwards

Bert sees further than most.

No, wait, that isn't what Dan wants to say.

But he's stoned again and the thoughts come on however they please; anarchic, smoky, swirling. It's unusual to find himself in the countryside at all – Quinn hates it for some reason (or no reason, Quinn hates a lot of stuff), and is currently up a tree over Dan's head, sharpening his knife on the bark. Or wiping it. Something. The grass is long and spotted with tall flowers he doesn't know the names of, and a lot of flies, or possibly bees, and they are smoking up to celebrate not being dead. "From this day forth today will be the Day of the Not-Dead," Dan says, sticking the end of a blade of grass in his mouth, "and people will celebrate by not going to Mexico and not getting drunk." He makes a face as a foul taste invades his mouth. "But they're gonna have to eat a ladybug, because I just did, and now it's traditional."

"Find me a ladybug," Bert commands, plaiting grass stalks together around where he sits, cross-legged on the dirt. He's mad, and the stalks keep breaking, and he keeps cursing under his breath. Normally being mad all the time is Quinn's job, but this time it's kind of Quinn's _fault_, so Quinn is up a tree and Jepha is wading through the long grass with armfuls of brushwood, looking out of place and chewing his piercings.

Jepha drops the kindling and goes in search of a bug for Bert to eat, and Dan moos at Bert, grass sticking out of the sides of his mouth, and Bert manages to crack a smile. He won't _stay_ mad at Quinn, Dan knows, because Bert can't stay mad at him forever (he's not Quinn; Quinn can pretty much stay mad at lint for a month), but until he stops being pissed about his plans going up in very literal smoke he's going to be a shitty little princess drama whore and Quinn's going to be an unpredictable nightmare and there are going to be a lot of collaterally broken faces in the interim.

The sun-and-shade of the leaves casts leopard spots of shadow on Dan's torso as he lies on his back. The weed is good and sticky and the sky is hot and blue and endless, and the crushing black weight of misery is as always hovering only a few inches over Dan Whitesides's head, threatening to drag him down at any minute.

He doesn't even remember when it started; the house he grew up in had always been so silent and so far away from everything: his mother's deafness, his sister's autism, his father's unending gloom (it ran in the family like a black dog), the perennial rain and the treacherous and steep mountain road all played their parts in that, muting everything until his childhood memories seem like a life lived under frosted glass.

He just … woke up one morning near the start of his adolescence with an unwanted boner and a terrible crushing sense of sadness that almost pinned him to the bed where he lay. For two hours he thought he was paralysed, his throat closing over, too far down in his own mind to call for help. As if anyone would have come.

Everything Dan knows now, he knows it to frighten away the falling cloud from settling on his head; breaking and entering (cunning + adrenaline + action = a burst of endorphins that hold off the darkness temporarily) and jokes (other people laugh because of _him_, he feels wanted, the darkness falters in its advance, and if they keep laughing he stays warm and alive and real) and fucking. Fucking. Losing himself in someone's body, in their breath and their reactions and their warmth, losing all trace of Dan Whitesides and becoming just the parts of him buried in flesh; all ways to anchor his mind to the real world and keep all the colours of it turned on.

Bert and Quinn and Jepha were the first people met in his life he who seemed really _alive_.

Prison, which nearly killed Quinn and nearly drove Dan to finally kill himself (anything to stop him falling, anything to shave away the constant darkness), made Jepha stronger and made Jepha faster. It gave him edges he'd never had before; Bert's never been, never to prison. Just to a catalogue of mental institutions that reads like a phone directory. One or two of them sound scarier to Dan than any state prison could possibly be.

Bert giggles when he mentions electro-shock therapy at thirteen, his parents' signatures signing away his right to object, and Dan could just throw up at the words, at the laugh. You get to know, with Bert, when he's laughing because something's funny, something's delighted him, or when he's laughing because he's too fucked up and broken inside to cry ever again.

Prison, then. Prison was a long time coming, Dan thinks. He'd kind of been waiting for it since he first started busting into houses and churches and store rooms, waiting for someone to notice he was a Bad Kid, waiting for someone to see that he was being followed by a dark cloud and trying to escape it. Waiting for someone to see that he existed at all.

About the third place he got into was the principal's office at junior high but all his file had to say was what he'd already heard: _Daniel does not seem to appreciate that there is a middle ground between sullen refusal to take part and continuous disruption by means of shouting out **bizarre** "jokes"_.

"I got a bug," Jepha says, holding his hand up slowly, something small and black running down his finger, over the colours. Jepha's colours make the whole world come into focus.

Up the tree, the gnarled and brown-grey tree, Quinn sneers at this whimsy. "You're going to poison yourself and fucking die."

And because Dan knows Quinn he knows that there's fear in that sentence even if Quinn will never see it or say it.

"Fuck yourself," Bert snaps, not looking at him, twisting grass stalks together in strange patterns, knocking flower heads about with his elbows and sending up great clouds of pollen, "I'm not _talking_ to you any more. You broke it. You break everything, you fucking ruin everything, you prick. I hope you _die_. Don't talk to me." He shoves his matted, colour-grimed hair behind his ear like a schoolgirl, and snaps another grass stalk, twisting it around his hand.

"Fuck you too," Quinn throws a lump of bark at him. It hits Bert in the foot, which means Quinn was aiming for his foot, because Dan thinks it's more likely that the world will turn pink and sparkly and unicorns will pop out of his ass than Quinn will ever miss his mark.

That's the other thing. Their fights are always this childish.

Dan has a theory: it's because they're both children inside, their clocks stopped so long ago in their lives. Quinn's stopped in the back of a car as he spat and screamed and kicked and watched _home_ become a memory, Bert's the moment his piano teacher called him an "unnaturally gifted boy". Their clocks smashed to bits with basements and electrodes, exorcisms and tape. It also covers, so neatly, why Quinn hates sex and Bert's so snickeringly ambivalent to it, not really interested, cares so little for it. Dan can't even fathom feeling like that; he fucking _needs_ it. Needs fucking.

And he loves them all, but he'll never say it with words. Words, here, mean things sideways to the things they meant to the rest of the world, and "love" is a barbed, vicious lie used to distort and justify the most terrible pain, so he tells them in other ways.

He tells Jepha with fingernails in his thighs and fucking him deep and hard and often, with his strangler's hands and thumbs in his throat, with punches and slaps and kisses and tugs of his hair, tugs on his piercings. He tells Jepha he loves him with twisted arms and Jepha's cheek pressed against walls and floors, holding him down, holding him together.

He listens to Bert and Quinn tell each other in volleys of foul-mouthed abuse, insults to their unloved and absent mothers, admonitions, fake scolding, bites, strange language rituals that no one could derive sense from, and in every look that passes between them. Only a blind idiot wouldn't be able to see it, and Dan's constantly amazed by how many fuckheads don't realise what's there.

He tells them he loves them by stealing insane gifts for Bert, by finding weird shit to spin him out, by breaking into houses with iron gates and grand pianos so Bert can play Rachmanioff's _Рапсодия на тему Паганини_ with jam-smeared fingers, so he can smash at the keys with the ferocity he always wanted to, so Quinn can follow a performance that would make connoisseurs weep in both joy and horror by smashing a priceless antique in to shreds and burning the remains.

He tells them he loves them by making Quinn laugh.

Quinn was the one who pulled Dan blinking into the light first, though he doesn't know it. He was going off like a volcano, smothering indiscriminately the landscape of the world with raging lava, destruction, blood. So angry his eyes were red with burst capillaries, his body vibrating, an unstoppable force of nature tearing down everything while Jepha and Bert hid behind a low wall and played pattycakes.

It had been so long since he'd felt anything but _crushed_ that it had taken Dan a while to realise he was balls-terrified. Piss-his-pants terrified, in fear for his life for the first time since he'd had one.

He'd never seen rage like it before, never seen how a body can be transformed into a shallow wrapper for an unending explosion, and when Quinn tumbled back into his own body and started breathing like a human being again Dan had shivered from the guts and _laughed_ his relief. And laughed, and laughed, and laughed. He was afraid it'd infuriate Quinn again: not so much that he'd flip out and take Dan to pieces but that he'd _leave_, that they'd all leave him and take the warmth and solidarity and the fragile beginnings of something real – but his hysteria just infected them all like rabies.

After that, the words come easy. Dumb jokes. Nicknames that last all damn day, driving down empty roads. Songs with no tune and no meaning. Total gibberish.

He's still appalled that they're so easily bought: tiny gifts, dimestore gestures turn Bert to mush (a rubber ball, a plastic tiara, a Styrofoam airplane kit). A hand around Jepha's wrist in a crowded place is enough to make him beam from ear to tunnelled ear. Quinn, who is more prone to grim satisfaction than mirth, becomes a wheezy, weedy, collapsing kid-giggler at the first sign of a crazy voice or a surreal remark. Huge differences. Tiny things are all they've got and Dan's almost heartbroken that he can't do something _big_ in return for the enormous thing they did for him:

They noticed him, and  
They kept him, and  
They listened, and  
They gave a shit.

Bert loves him because Bert loves everything ugly, everything shitty and broken and dirty and fucked-up. That's how Dan knows he loved Gerard Way, really fucking loved him, more and more the dirtier and more broken he got; he will never breathe a hint of this, not to Quinn. Quinn hurts enough as it is, and Bert can't help reaching out with his whole twisted-up heart to the messy and ruined fragments of people he meets, any more than Quinn can help tearing down the walls or Jepha can help beating off to the beatings he gets or Dan can help needing to be heard. To be needed. To make them laugh.

"Fall out and _die_," Bert instructs, still mutilating grass.

They're going to keep this up until Quinn gets down, Dan knows. Then they will shout themselves hoarse, and Bert will spit at Quinn and Quinn will set something alight and Bert will kiss him, holding his head still like a reluctant horse, and it will all be normal again. It's going to be some time; he reaches out and grabs Jepha's ankle as he passes, hard enough to bruise. "Siddown."

Jepha drops like a painted stone, a child's paperweight, positioning himself so Dan can grip his thigh; Jepha's so skinny he can almost encircle it with his fingers.

Dan kind of wants to bury himself in Jepha's body right now (when doesn't he?). Escape from the world, from the precipice his mind's always balanced on; like the darkness can't get him if he's inside someone. Protecting his mind within a cage of flesh, protecting his mind with the damage he does.

He's ugly. He knows that. The frog that got the princess – Jepha finds this comparison hilarious – and ugly-grateful, grateful that there is someone out there that fits him like this.

Back in the Way Hotel, Bert read to them from a magazine like it was scripture: "Hey Jepha, how do you rate your level of sexual satisfaction in your busy modern life? Out of ten."

Jepha deliberated for some time as he unlaced his sneakers and threw them onto the floor. "Eight."

"EIGHT?" Dan made an exaggeratedly sulky face. "No more tiaras for _you_."

"He's not on your dick _right at this minute_, that's all," Quinn snorted, tearing a sheet into strips. No reason, just mindless destruction; but that's Quinn all over, and he gets antsy and uncomfortable when they talk about fucking, while Bert just gets giggly.

"Get on his dick then answer the question," Bert instructed, a finger up his nose. "Or it's not _representative_ of your views. Dan, what's your level of sexual satisfaction?"

"I'm _eating_," Dan complained, holding a bag of popcorn away from his lap as Jepha got at his zipper. A couple of kernels fell off the top and onto the bunched-up sheets.

"Not an answer," Bert said sternly, wagging a finger at them for emphasis. The nail varnish was chipped and flaked and his skin was as always red-raw and a little scabbed; Quinn leaned forwards and knocked the popcorn out of Dan's hands, scattering white like a snowstorm all over the dark-coloured suite. "Hooray, you're not eating any more. Dan, rate your sexual satisfaction."

"Ask me in five minutes," Dan said. Jepha had a handful of lube on his dick with the kind of speed and practice that occasionally made Dan wonder if there was some sort of training programme he'd missed in school that taught other people to handle dick. He was already getting red in the face, never mind hard in the crotch, and Bert's snickering did nothing to detract from that.

The first time they did this, did this in front of Bert and Quinn, he didn't think to feel self-conscious or weird or anything but incredibly horny, and since then he's just kind of gone with it. It's normal, the same way everything is normal when it's with them; Bert occasionally throws things at them, rates them out of ten, passes comment on the tempo of Dan's fucking, gives pointers – but mostly he just giggles and pretends to grope himself. The groping is invariably directed at Quinn.

"Quinn, rate your level of sexual satisfaction," Bert said, apparently choosing this day to be oblivious to the fact that Quinn would rather stick his hand in a vat of acid than his dick in another human being.

"With your mom, a minus three," Quinn said, tearing another strip off the sheet. "She could be more romantic."

"How?" Bert managed to hit himself on the nose with the magazine; Dan was rather more occupied with Jepha, who was straddling his thighs with his jeans around his knees and his own fingers in his ass. It was a much, much more alluring sight than Bert failing to keep a grip on literature. "I thought you liked the sheep costume, Quinnery-Quinn-face. You misled her."

From this angle, Dan couldn't see Jepha's face, but he knew the expression well enough to picture it; eyes closed and crinkled at the corners, his snakebites protruding like tree stumps as he sucked his lower lip into his mouth to keep it from falling open. Dan got his hands around Jepha's thighs and tugged him backwards; there was always a chance Jepha wasn't going to get his fingers out of his own damn ass, it had happened before, but this time he moved his hand.

"She could learn to say 'I love your dick' through electrical tape," Quinn said absently, tearing one of the sheet strips in two. His rape gag and the sound of cotton tearing covered the low noise Dan made in his throat, against his will, as Jepha settled onto his dick like he'd been made for that purpose alone.

Jepha leaned back into Dan's chest, stretched his arm lazily back around Dan's neck, and made an appropriately boneless smile dribble onto his face.

"Rate your sexual satisfaction out of ten _now_," Bert said, rocking forward to smack Jepha on the sole of the foot with the rolled-up magazine.

"Nine," Jepha said a little indistinctly. Dan turned his groan into a mock-growl and grabbed Jepha's dick, hard, making sure the ring twisted between his fingers. "Nine point one."

"Nine point one?" Dan made an effort to keep his voice steady as Jepha rocked back, slow and gentle, his hips moving and his shoulders almost still, "See if I ever get you a cake again, you fucking liar."

Quinn snorted. "Bert, where's your mark out of ten?"

"Ten," Bert said in a bored voice, lying on his stomach like a bird-watcher, his chin on his hands. "I am continually sexually satisfied to the max at all times. Like right now, I am coming. Right right now. Coming in my pants."

"Wait for the rest of us," Dan muttered, and Quinn gave a giggle which was apparently unexpected even for him. He squeezed Jepha's dick again, harder, and got for his efforts a loud and throaty groan right by his ear, the kind that always plugged a feed line directly into his balls. Pretty neat feedback loop Nature had installed there: getting Jepha off got him off made Jepha get off…

"Jepha?" Bert drawled.

"Nine point two," Jepha said in a faint voice, and Dan slapped him, hard, in the thigh. "Nine point threeeeee."

"You're a crappy princess," Dan said, locking his arm around Jepha's waist tight enough to be able to squeeze him hard but loose enough Jepha could still move, "a shit boyfriend. Terrible, terrible lay." He turned his head so he could mutter directly into Jepha's ear, and gave his neck a lick while he was there. "Bert, you have to find me a girlfriend, I can't take any more of this faggotry."

Which was true, but not really in the sense that he'd said it.

"Rate your levels, Dan Whitesides!" Bert barked, rolling onto his back and staring up at them. "Oh man, sex looks freakish upside-down."

"TWO," Dan said more loudly than he'd meant to, "this is the worst sex I've ever had in my life. Jepha, I hate you and I'm never fucking you again – take your hand off your nipples when I'm disowning you – " he slapped Jepha's wrist away and caught it in the same movement, holding his fingers back from his chest awkwardly. Jepha made a frustrated sound and ground down harder on Dan's dick, and Dan nearly bit off his own tongue. "You're a terrible lay and I hate you, Jepha Howard."

He shut his eyes as Bert started cackling, and there was a _swoosh_ and a _thump_ that was probably Quinn sliding off the bed. Bert's voyeurism tended towards the giggly and obnoxious, which was cool, but Quinn … Quinn got off on listening, or watching, and yet for some reason didn't like anyone to see that. Or acknowledge it. Kind of sad, Dan thought, because the idea that someone got off on him getting Jepha off … just another piece in that amazing feedback loop.

Dan draped Jepha's hand over his own crotch and walked his fingers back up over his body, carefully navigating _between_ his nipples, until his hand rested loose and collar-like around the base of Jepha's neck. Jepha, of course, came with instructions for times like this tattooed on the underside of his chin, just in case whomever he was fucking forgot that he was essentially the biggest pervert on the planet.

Jepha helpfully let his head slump back over Dan's shoulder, right next to his cheek, close enough that stubble scraped painfully over stubble; nice for Jepha, not so much for Dan. And his hand closed around his dick, squeezing even tighter than Dan had as he started jerking himself off in time with his rocking back and forth.

Closing his own hand around Jepha's throat tight enough to send his breaths jagged but not _actually_ kill him, feeling Jepha's racing pulse under his fingers as he squeezed, Dan twisted his own head round enough to bite the side of Jepha's face, and Jepha made another one of those balls-breaking noises.

"_Harder_," he whispered, or slurred, out of his drooped-open mouth. It was always impossible to tell which _harder_ he meant, but at least this time Dan was sure it wasn't anything to do with fucking. He took a chance and tightened his grip on Jepha's throat, rewarded by a hitch of breath and a strangled pant. "_Hn_."

"Sounds like about a nine point eight by now," Bert said conversationally. The mattress dipped. "Quinn, you filthy dirty pervert, have you reached plus numbers yet?"

"FUCK OFF," Quinn snarled from, oh yes, that did sound like the floor. Dan bit down harder, this time on the lobe Jepha's ear, his tongue slipping through the flesh tunnel like his dick into Jepha's ass.

"_Hn_," Jepha said again, with that whiny little hitch at the end that usually meant he was half-suffocating and also about to come. Dan shoved down on Jepha's thighs with his free hand, and extracted his tongue from Jepha's ear with difficulty.

"You-ah-you," Dan said, not quite getting the same level of disdain as before, "you, you _motherfucker_, you are the worst, worst, fucking, worst –"

"Dan approaches double figures," Bert said in his best NASCAR commentator voice, "will he overtake Jepha? Or will Quinn bring on a _spurt_ from the _rear_ and go on to win from behind?"

"IF YOU DON'T STOP SAYING THAT I'M GOING TO FUCKING HURT YOU," Quinn snapped from the floor, and he sounded fucked-out and breathy even to Dan's preoccupied ears. Hot. Seriously fucking hot. Dan's balls were beginning to ache something stupid.

"_Ah_," Jepha observed, his head rolling even further back over Dan's shoulder, and Dan gave his windpipe a peremptory squeeze. The next _ah_ was choked off but all the more intense, and he could feel Jepha shifting and shaking on top of him, ready to go some.

"SAY TEN, JEPHA," Bert shouted, apparently losing interest.

"_T—t—t,_" Jepha stuttered from between clenched teeth.

"You _fucking suck_," Quinn insisted from the floor. Dan mentally thanked him and smacked Jepha in the thigh hard enough to leave a huge bruise.

"-worst, worst, lay _ever_," he finished, heat building in his face. He was pretty sure he was going to hit that perfect ten not long after Jepha did, only hanging on to _not_ coming first by the skin of his teeth.

"ten," Jepha whispered, and his hips went right on rippling while the rest of him went slowly limp.

Dan rubbed the side of his face against the side of Jepha's, stubble on stubble, and Jepha exhaled over him like he was deflating. "Fuck you," Dan grunted, "don't you even think about stopping moving, you lazy fuck." The words were not the most coherent he'd ever uttered, because pretty much all the blood in his body was in his dick, and every little twitch of Jepha's body shuddered through to his balls.

When he came, his head spiralling empty, he sank his teeth into Jepha's deltoid so hard he left dents for two days.

"You lose, Quinn," Bert said. Dan opened one eye in time to see Bert dangling off the edge of the king-sized bed, his head up in Quinn's business.

There was a shriek of laughter and a loud, "OH FUCKING YEAH?" and as realisation dawned, Bert's hysterical giggling was accompanied by Jepha's snicker.

"Oh my god, Quinn, you fucking _beast_," he leaned forward in Dan's lap, but with Dan's hands both clamped to his thighs, holding him place, he didn't go anywhere.

Bert flopped back onto the bed with a snail-trail of jizz smeared across his face and looking like a mad gargoyle as he tried to lick it off with his demonically long tongue and contorted everything into weird positions doing it. "Quinn, your mother is the fattest, skankiest ho alive," he said in a voice of some awe, between fits of the giggles."

"She's probably dead," Quinn said, still out of sight. He didn't sound especially bothered, just worn out.

"Whatever. Her ass is like a planet. I shoved my prick in there –" Bert flopped back over the bed, backwards this time, the kind of position only an ex-gymnast could achieve without agony, "—and it got lost in a sea of all the jizz from a million other guys. It was like swimming."

"Man, that's poetry," Dan said, approvingly. Bert could really take a Your Mom line to new heights.

"So what I'm saying is," Bert said seriously, "you mom is a dirty fat whore, Quinn."

There was a long pause. "Your mom fucks donkeys in hell, Bert."

Bert disappeared over the edge of the bed almost entirely, and Jepha slumped back into Dan's chest. Dan wound his arm around Jepha's stomach and kissed him on the back of the ear, and Jepha flinched.

"And if you don't let me kiss you right fucking now," Bert continued, "I will shit on your face while you're asleep."

"Aww, romance," Jepha murmured, drooping over Dan's shoulder again.

A minute or two later Bert rolled back onto the bed looking pleased with himself, and Quinn's head – his thin hair completely fucked up and his face still flushed – popped above the edge of the bed looking confused but calmer and more wide-eyed than normal.

"Rating?" Bert asked, glaring at him.

Quinn was chewing on something. Popcorn, apparently. "Dinner _and_ a show," Quinn said, slamming his fist down on the bed. "I can't handle this kind of commitment. I want a divorce."

"Your mom wants a divorce from her ugly face," Bert smirked, picking half-chewed popcorn out of Quinn's mouth and eating it. "DAN, RATE YOURSELF."

Dan flexed his fingers over Jepha's belly. "Twelve."

"Cheat," Jepha smiled, trying to bury his face in Dan's neck without turning around and not really succeeding. "Cheating fucking cheater."

Back in the meadow, the fight's still flourishing.

"Shut up," Quinn snarls, and Dan closes his eyes, flexes his fingers over Jepha's leg, digging in to hear the subvocal moan that assures him he's … still got a grip.

Quinn and Bert _will_ fight this out eventually. He's seen enough of them to know they don't break apart forever; Bert waits like a twitching statue outside police stations and prisons, Jepha's told him. And Quinn skulks in hospital waiting rooms with armfuls of stolen clothing to sign release forms, Jepha's told him.

Jepha tells him anything he wants to know, and Dan makes sure to never want to know the things Jepha cannot stand to say.

_Basements and hospitals and handcuffs and silence_; they all have their nightmares.

Quinn burns out basements in abandoned houses and ones they're just visiting, hurling cans of kerosene, gasoline, down the stairs. Lit matches, and fury. He watches the explosions from too close, sometimes so close Dan has to pick him up or drag him away by his waist (grateful that his fingers can have a purchase on Quinn's psycho-slippery body when they need to).

Jepha, who is so keen to be held down and hurt, cut and bruised, choked and fucked till Dan's sore from hurting him, Jepha freezes like a frame in a stopped film at the sight of those metal police bracelets. Only a second, but you can see it in his muscles: _don't go there_. Don't ask. And Dan doesn't ask, but he knows now not to let Jepha see them.

Bert's not a fan of hospitals. The one time they had to go in one, Jepha had a nail through his foot, and Dan had to half-carry him, sweating and white-faced and mute, to an ER. Cracking dumb jokes about Jesus the whole way to stop anyone going crazy, including himself. Stolen credit cards, patience, and wary stares from the staff carried Dan through on a wave of weirdness; Bert grew more and more fidgety, squirming in the plastic seat and blurting obscenities and belching at people until he got up and paced, and paced, pulling his hair, looking more and more hospitalisable himself.

Until he crashed away into a bathroom and Quinn chased after him, following like he was on a leash.

(Dan snuck in afterward and found "BUTTHOLES" smeared on the wall in eight-inch high letters with what was almost certainly shit. Sometimes Bert's self-expression was cryptic at best)

Weird though the solution was, Bert's distress at being there was so real and so acute it cut a swathe through Dan's first worries and bolstered them like scar tissue into a double-panic. It was after the hospital that Jepha'd told him about the institutions, the electrocution, the chairs with straps, the nurses and the pills; Bert had already mentioned the exorcisms, done a bone-chilling impression of how it looks when you're pretending that the demons are leaving your body.

After the hospital let Jepha out and charged his care and his bandaged foot and his opiates to one Mrs Steven Bates's credit card, Quinn yelled at it him for so long his throat bled, so long and so hard Dan nearly snapped and hit him.

Suicide. It would have been suicide.

He knows it was in part just a freak-out that Jepha was hurt, that Quinn hadn't been able to stop it happening (that they could protect each other from assholes but from carpentry): "WATCH WHERE YOU'RE GOING NEXT TIME YOU FUCKING MORON WHY THE HELL DON'T YOU WEAR SHOES THAT FUCKING PLACE IS FULL OF SHIT YOU DON'T EVEN DESERVE TO BE ALIVE" means "you scared the shit out of me and made me care what happens to you" and not just when Quinn's screaming it.

And it's part freak-out over Bert coming so close to losing it. _Because he can't protect Bert from himself_, no matter how much he tries. Quinn's dilemma is Dan's dilemma.

Dan sat on the lid of a garbage can while Bert rolled a skinny, leaning on Dan's leg, and Quinn – careful to keep his hands to himself – dressed Jepha down for having been dumb enough to stand on a nail and fuck up his foot.

Jepha took it pretty well. When Quinn was done yelling he gave him a pack of peanuts and a Band-aid he'd stolen from the hospital and Quinn punched the brickwork of the wall beside his head; that, then, was what the Band-aid was for.

"I hope you choke on your own vomit and die in a dumpster, you fucking meth-addict fuck-up," Quinn calls, throwing more bark down from the tree. It hits the same spot as before; he's not gonna aim for Bert's face, for Bert's hands, and Quinn doesn't miss. Quinn never misses.

"And I hope you choke on a diseased dick, you homofag fuck," Bert shouts, spitting in his general direction. It's not a great success as a projectile, of course, and it lands on Dan's chin instead. If this _wasn't_ the middle of a serious bitchfight Dan would say, "Aww, do I have to? Can't I stick it up my nose instead?"

But he just puts one hand behind his head and gives Jepha's leg a tentative squeeze with the other. Jepha twists and stretches and a moment or two later there's the end of a joint shoved, damp with Bert's saliva, between Dan's lips. Jepha drags the spit down over Dan's neck with his forefinger, and Dan slides his hand further up Jepha's thigh until his fingers bend around the taut denim of a too-tight crotch seam.

When he's _not_ fighting like this with Quinn, Bert's a pretty fucking smart balance-keeper: _he sees more than most_. He's got the kind of eyes that can see the floor rising in Quinn's volcano, can see when he needs to find Quinn a fight or risk him tearing himself apart against the jagged edges of something he can't beat; Bert finds a douche and starts a scene until Quinn has to intervene. Sometimes Quinn just has to vent, and Bert can see those times because he has goddamn x-ray vision.

Or he sees when Jepha's caving in, falling apart, when he needs more to hold him in shape than Dan can give, than any one single person can give. Bert ties him to a bed or a railing or a branch, gets a knife or a scalpel or a sharpened credit card. He gets Quinn's hands on Jepha's ankles or his throat or his wrists. He gets a blade to at his throat or his belly or his dick, gets Dan to do his thing. _Gives_. Bert's generous.

His generosity even covers Dan, too. He has the kind of eyes that can see when the blackness is descending; he is a mood barometer, he knows the clouds. And he harries the darkness away, nipping Dan unexpectedly, shoving Jepha at him like a fucking chew toy, a distraction, winding up Quinn like a clockwork torch so Dan can follow the light of his furious fires back, follow him _home_.

Dan rubs his thumb over the crotch seam of Jepha's jeans again, pressing it into his dick, harder. Harder. Jepha sits up straight as a kid at Sunday school, and smiles one of his filthiest smiles.

"DICK," Quinn retorts, throwing more bark in a careful circle around where Bert's sitting. Bert screws up a grass stalk in his hands, and gets to his feet.

Dan rubs his thumb down the length of the seam, and inhales a soft green cloud, his fingers splayed over Jepha's thigh like a cage of bones and skin. The fight has shifted weight; it's not about the Ways any more. It's not about how Quinn managed to kill someone by _not_ doing anything this time, not about how he 'fucked everything up' (Dan's not exactly torn that they left the fucking hotel, it was a soul-destroying mausoleum full of grief and misery towards the end and the shadows were growing infinite). How Quinn fucked everything up by being nothing other than just _Quinn_.

The fight is pretty much just a fight for the sake of fighting now.

"Come down here and fucking say that!" Bert shrieks. He's on the verge of giggling, it's lurking in his voice like the shadow of sanity.

Quinn throws the knife.

It lands, point-down, two inches from Bert's toe, and Bert doesn't bat an eyelid, doesn't flinch a single muscle. "You fucking homo buttlick shit!" Bert screeches, making gimme hands like a toddler. "GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE VEGETATION AND _GIMME SNOT_."

"Go suck it out of Jepha's nose," Quinn yells, but he's already climbing down, awkward and stiff as always, his feet sliding over the bark.

Jepha clamps his hand over his own nose and says in a muffled, horrified voice, "Not _my_ BOOGERS."

"I'm saving them for pie," Dan explains, now things have defused enough to let him crack jokes again. He uncups his hand from Jepha's thigh, and – holding a joint with one hand and a zipper pull with the other – breaks into and enters Jepha's pants. All right, he can only get the tips of his fingers on Jepha's stupid-ass bananahammock because of the angle and the tightness of his pants, but it's enough to make Jepha grin under his hand and tilt his hips towards Dan.

How the hell he does that when he's sitting straight on his ass Dan will never know but it's one of his favourite mysteries. Even physics don't obey their own laws around Jepha's crotch, it's just that magic.

"I'm making booger pie," Dan repeats, passing Jepha the joint, stroking his two fingers as far as they will go, a couple of inches up and down over red fabric. It's like fingering a girl more than jerking off a guy, but that's also kind of hot. Dan watches Jepha inhale and blow a stutter of smoke into the hot blue sky in interrupted jolts. "Princess Jepha's snot is reserved for the BOOGER BANQUET, it's traditional. Every day of the Not Dead, we have a Booger Banquet, and it shall be called the Banquetboogerbuttfuckbumlicious—" Dan forces a belch. "It's _traditional_."

"Your mom is traditional," Quinn is down, lurking like a stray dog just out of Bert's reach, still not sure. His knife sticks out of the dirt like a marker or a magnet, right by Bert's foot, calling him in.

Bert picks up a bit of bark from the ground and flings it back at Quinn. It misses, because Bert is a lousy, lousy shot. "Don't be a _fuckass_, fuckass."

Quinn's shoulders bunch up like panties in an asscrack. Dan watches through the clouds of Jepha's smoke and the slow haze settling protectively on his brain as Bert puts both palms flat on the top of his skull and _screams_, one of those blood-drawing, blood-curdling yells that shakes buildings to their very foundations. Somewhere in the meadow a cloud of frightened birds take to the air; there words in there, something about Quinn's mom, and Dan strokes, curling and uncurling his fingers over red cotton. Telling Jepha he loves him while Bert tells Quinn the same thing, in their own codes. Their own smoke signals.

Dan laughs. Jepha tips his head back and blows smoke from his nose.

Quinn picks up his knife from the soil by Bert's feet and says sullenly, "Don't be an asshole, asshole." He puts his knife in his pocket and a finger up his nose; wipes snot on Bert's shoulder like he's knighting him.

Bert tilts his head back and spits on Quinn's cheek like a fucking llama and even from this distance Dan can see it's flecked with blood from the screams.

It's not going to take a while to flush Gerard Way from Bert's heart, but Quinn is always there to protect it, and this is the beginning.

"Save that for the pie," Dan suggests.

"Nah," Bert says, "Quinn's snot is too toxic for you pussies. It's eating through my shoulder right now."

"It'll get fucking herpes," Quinn snorts. His shoulders are unbunched, and when Bert mouths _from your mom_ he just rolls his eyes.

"Quinn's boogers have herpes," Dan tells Jepha, who is soft at the head with smoke and hard in the pants with stroking and smiling like a faded photo of a sex crime. "I guess your boogers must have AIDS."

"My boogers are safety guys," says Jepha, who lets guys he barely knows fuck him bareback with knives at his throat.

Bert dips and steals the joint from his lips, dropping a kiss on his eyelids – Jepha's uneven smile is all bliss – and takes just one lung before passing it to Quinn, fingers to fingers; Quinn's are lump with old scars and breaks, and he accepts the burning thing without looking at it.

"Stop teasing him and fuck already," Bert says severely, "you fucking bully."

Dan rolls over on his side and extracts his fingers from Jepha's pants with a flourish, shaking them like he's freed them from a trap. Jepha whines under his breath, and Dan gets up and knocks Jepha onto his back in one simple movement, straddling his hips, his knees grinding his weight into the rough soil and grass stems as Jepha's back smacks down.

Dan lunges and pins Jepha to the ground by his skinny wrists, smiling full and fierce-contented into his metal-strewn face; nips at his piercings but doesn't touch them.

"So, I should stop teasing you?" Dan asks, grinding his hips down into Jepha's. Jepha, predictably perhaps, smiles a guileless and boneless smile and presses up as best he can against Dan's dick. He's hard; Dan's got a semi and the more he thinks about this (vicious fucking against the dirt, his hand in Jepha's hair and pulling, biting the back of his neck, and Bert and Quinn offering a giggling commentary and the silent, breathy voyeuristic approval) the hornier he gets.

He lets go of Jepha's wrist for long enough to slap him, fucking _hard_, across the face, kissing the raw spot a second later as he gets his fingers back around bones, his stinging fingers. "Answer the fucking question, you dirty whore," Dan says quietly, because if there's one thing these four fragile fuck-ups favour, it's coprolalia. Filthy words. Tenderness in violence, love in hatred. Vile words for beautiful things.

"Please," Jepha says, rubbing his hips upwards.

Dan wouldn't say he _loves_ it when Jepha begs. It's hard not to give in immediately, because holding out on this inky fucking body is holding out on himself, too, but he'd say; he _fucking loves_ it when there's a soupçon of desperation in Jepha's voice. He worries that this is cruelty; he reminds himself that kind cruelty, caring cruelty is what Jepha thrives on. They fit. Dan gets off on Jepha getting off.

And Jepha won't tell him to stop, ever. The only time Jepha's ever said, _stop_, Dan stopped. Dan stopped everything he was doing and saying so fast it was like the whole world had stopped. They were smoking up in an abandoned house where empty iron bedsteads sprouted handcuffs long-rusted and Dan hadn't thought to think at the time that it was freakish Jepha hung back from those rooms. And they were smoking up and Quinn and Bert were singing abduction lullabies – or Bert was singing and Quinn was suggesting more and more terrible fates for the kids in the van and some of them were so awful that Dan had to start cracking jokes just to keep the lump forming in his throat thinking that they were probably things Quinn knew first hand.

So he was cracking jokes about nothing in particular and they were green and slow and syrupy and happy, Jepha just done blowing Bert (because Bert thought it might be fun to try and still didn't have an opinion on it one way or another but liked the way Jepha looked blowing him almost as much as Dan did), one of those rare days when Quinn was unknotted enough to allow his head to droop onto Dan's lap, to let Dan brush his hair about with the ends of his fingers. One of those times Dan had already almost put his foot in it by offering to jerk Quinn off since he was groping furtively at himself over Jepha blowing Bert like he didn't know what to do with his own dick.

And they were there in this bright and boneless, beautifully smoky post-coital bliss, and Dan made some aimless smart remark about the police raping kids in the back of the house, no worse than anything that Quinn'd been suggesting, and he said that was what the handcuffs in the spare room was for and while Bert went right on singing regardless and Quinn went right on wiping the remains of his own come into the thighs of his blood-stained jeans, Jepha said, "Stop."

Dan stopped as abruptly as if Jepha slit his throat. Stopped his breath in his lungs and his hands in his own armpits and stopped like there was a knife in the back of time.

That was it for the longest time.

Dan was filling his pockets with pretzel packets in a gas station in nowhere while Quinn kicked holes in everything that would break and Bert browsed months-out-of-date magazines when Jepha said, like it'd only just happened, "You stopped."

Dan said, "Yeah."

"Why?"

Dan said, "You asked me to," in a slightly puzzled voice, still stuffing pretzels into his sweater pockets until he looked like he was pregnant.

Jepha stared at him like it was the most outrageous sentence anyone had ever uttered, then got Dan's hand by the thumb, pulled his fingers to Jepha's throat and left them to tighten there like a collar. "Yours."

"Jesus, you fuck like my Dad," Bert says, and Dan makes a face.

"What, seasick from rolling around on top of your fat mom's shuddering belly?" he asks, and, "No, don't think just because I let your wrist go you're allowed to move."

"DANIEL WHITESIDES," Bert shouts, dropping into a crouch beside him as Dan pushes Jepha's Thundercats t-shirt up into his armpits, exposing ink and ribs and nipples and piercings to the sweaty summer air, "you _fuckass_." He kisses Dan abruptly on the mouth, catching his lip and nearly tearing it, before flopping back on his haunches to watch like he's burning ants.

Everyone gets what they need as long as they stick together.

Dan wriggles back enough to take Jepha's pants and his stupid fucking bananahammock down to his thighs, and leans up, sticks two fingers over Jepha's mouth like a moustache. "You should grow a mo."

"He _is_ a mo," Bert snickers.

"Nah, I'm just easy," Jepha says in the lost and treacly voice of someone who is enjoying just how easy he is.

Dan pokes him in the cheek. "No one said you could open your mouth to _talk_." And he sticks his fingers into Jepha's mouth. Sometimes Dan wastes hours trying to work out if he prefers his fingers in Jepha's mouth or his ass; they're both like reaching inside and trying to twist up his strings, both the start of disappearing somewhere warm and wet and safe, disappearing inside his body.

His scar on that side catches the sun.

Dan doesn't think about that much. Prison was prison, shit happened, they stole his laces and they didn't think to take his phone card. Shit happened, shit happened in blood and silence and night, and it doesn't matter any more, because the stitches were only just out when he found three fucked-up freaks hanging by a Co-op and found his way home. The scars don't matter any more.

Jepha sucks Dan's fingers like he's sucking dick.

Dan chews back wordless sounds, Jepha's tongue a thick wet tunnel cupped around his fingers, interrupted by the little hard round protuberance he knows feels fucking _unbelievable_ against the head of his dick: tongue stud. He knows the feeling on his fingers and how this translates to his dick, and his dick strains angrily for freedom at this knowledge.

Jepha closes his teeth gently against Dan's knuckles – they're fucking _sharp_, too – a little warning, a little impatience: _I can tease too._

Dan flicks Jepha in the nipple ring, which thanks to the amount of metal in it quite literally hurts him as much as it does the squirming, panting Princess Painslut under him, and Jepha lets go his hand reluctantly.

It's not always this … straightforward. It's sometimes more Jepha getting so jittery and fucked out and weirdly pissy – kicking road signs and cussing out cloud formations, arguing vehemently with song lyrics, too slow in the voice to be convincingly mad but twitching all the same – until Dan's got a pretext, a handle; something small.

Like he'll lose money on purpose in some fucking stupid card game with _kids_. Like he _wants_ someone mad at him.

Times like that, it's not sex but herding, crowding Jepha into a corner, pinning him face-first to the floor, twisting up his arms until he quits writhing and cussing and goes limp and quiet.

Dan jokes through it because the sound of Jepha's near-silent dry sobs are deafening on heart; he doesn't know what the fuck those moments are for but he's long been of the opinion that you don't need to understand someone to love them.

Right now it's as easy as drinking, easy as nudity; Dan's dick is a fucking steel rod in his pants and Jepha gets his tongue between Dan's fingers again until Dan's sure his face is fucking … neon pink. Pink from wanting.

Jepha pushes up against him, against air, his dick hard and hot and eager, and Dan kneels his way, knees his way down onto the soil between Jepha's skinny, inky thighs (tearing pants down as he goes). His arm aches from stretching; Bert snickers in his ear, miles away and right up close.

He can't hear Quinn. Dan hopes he's still there; it's just normal now, just … part of the whole process. For Quinn to be there, listening, watching, hunched.

Dan slithers his fingers from Jepha's mouth, stringy with saliva, and slips them both – slow and purposeful – into Jepha's ass. The feeling's much the same, but drier, tighter (dirtier) … he presses his thumb into Jepha's fucking … No Man's Land, his ass-skin, the drum-taut wasteland between his balls and the sewagey-perfect sanctuary of his asshole. There's a packet of lube in Dan's back pocket, of course, but right now there's no need. No need.

Jepha makes a cut-off sound and fingers scrabble kinda awkwardly, backwardly at the dirt and grass above his head. There's a rustle and Bert's there, wicked-tooth grinning, his little monkey hands holding Jepha's wrists together and grinding them down into the ground. He catches Dan's eye.

Bert's eyes are the hot blue of the dog-day skies above, reckless turmoil and depths no one could survive. Dan raises an eyebrow.

"A good Christian boy always helps those in need," Bert smirks, his solemn tone at odds with his goonish grin. Fractures and dissonance are him all over; he's come close to kneeling on Jepha's fingers but not quite going through with it right now. And although Bert's being as snide and facetious as ever on the subject, Dan can't help thinking it's also weirdly _true_ of him.

With his wrists caught firmly in Bert's hands and his knees raised in mountain peaks and Dan kneeling on his pants to keep him out of the way, Jepha's trying without much success to wriggle down further onto Dan's fingers. Dan holds his hand very still, giving him no help at all. "You're forgetting the magic word."

"_Please_," Jepha whines, holding his knees briefly closed around Dan.

"The other one," Dan says, trying to undo his pants one-handed. He knows he _can_ from long practice, but it takes some doing and it's made less easy by having wood like crazy that's aggravated by every brush of his fingers. "The other magic word is --?"

"Please fuck me," Jepha says in head-rush tones.

"Nope, wrong magic word. The magic word is _shazamallallaballabuttfuckbangbangwobblewobbleassfuckdobuttdickdickkapowsplut._"

Bert's girly giggles and Quinn's startled bark on Dan's other side are joined by Jepha half-groaning, half-sniggering in dismay. "Shazamalla-haha-allaballa- _what_?"

"Good enough," Dan says indistinctly, tearing open a lube packet with his teeth. He's got very good at that since knowing these guys and he can't say he's sorry to have picked up the skill; that and shoplifting and distraction techniques. He was already good at getting in places – including, thankfully, his own pants. "And the other one again," he adds, shivering involuntarily as he gets a palmful of lube onto his dick. He can't even remember how to unroll a condom but this shit's second nature, his fingers making a banana bend inside Jepha's ass, and that makes _him_ thump his head on the ground.

"_Please_, Dan, _please_\--"

And Dan's on him and in him, shaking Bert loose, one hand dragging Jepha's head back by the hair, the other pinning him by the throat as he kisses, bites at Jepha's mouth, and his dick breaks into and enters Jepha's body, just like that. _Home_.

He's sweating so much his clothes feel like he's been in the sea. The day is hot. There are flies, lazy sun-slowed flies investigating him no matter how he blows them away. There's salt water in his eyes and not enough air in his lungs; Jepha's hips are sharp and his dick is hard and hot against Dan's belly. His legs like tree branches over Dan's back.

Gratitude, gratitude. That there's someone he fits like this, who doesn't want him to stop for fear of getting a little bruised; Dan fucks _hard_. It's just the way he's built, inside and out. Hard means no uncertainties creeping in, no doubt, no tendrils of darkness when he's trying to escape; his hips are on fire.

"yes," Jepha's voice is faint as Dan's mouth slips and slides up his cheek. Dan bites him somewhere to the side of his mouth and the 'yes' becomes an '_OHmmmmmmmm_'.

There are still cracks; that fucking hotel's done no end of damage to them all, but Dan thinks they're fixable with time and patience. There may be hairlines through the bones of Jepha's calm and Bert's vision and Quinn's trust and Dan's happiness but those will mend, they've got the glue right here. All _he_ has to do is follow them home and dig for the surface and everything will be okay.

Everything will be okay.


End file.
